Ireland has now reached over 54,000 genotypes for dairy females. This is a very significant number of female genotypes and would not have been possible without the support of the Irish farmers, herdbooks, AI companies, Teagasc and the DAFM. (more…)
As part of our ongoing improvements to the ICBF dairy genetic/genomic evaluations systems and processes, there will be a number of new developments for 2018. (more…)
New beef Euro-Star evaluations have just been published by ICBF. This will see the Euro-Star indexes for all suckler cows, heifers, stock bull and AI bulls updated. (more…)
The latest proofs (Eurostar and EBI figures) have now been published and will be available to view on every animal in your HerdPlus profiles. All AI bulls have also been updated. (more…)
In the December evaluation, ICBF implemented new software to calculate genomic predictions and reliabilities. The new software ensures the genomic predictions are utilising the most up-to-date methods available which replaces the old system which had been in operation since 2009. (more…)
In line with international best practice, Ireland has now moved to applying a Test Day Model (TDM) approach for genetic evaluation of milk production traits, as opposed to the previous approach of predicted 305-day yield. (more…)
In 2006, we started our mission to provide herd-owners with Dairy HerdPlus containing profiles, reports and applications which would supply useful data for herd owners to aid in decision making on farm and result in increased on-farm profit. In 2007 the HerdPlus service was also rolled out for Beef herds. (more…)
The ICBF animal search facility has had over 3.7 million individual hits for the year 2017. This is an impressive statistic and shows just how much dairy and beef farmers, including people from the breeding industry value the animal search. (more…)
Some recent commentary has suggested that using daughter proven bulls is more profitable than using genomic bulls. This is certainly not the case when we analyse the data from Irish commercial dairy herds! The data is clearly showing that progeny from genomic sires are performing some 3 days better in calving interval, 5% better in survival and 34kg more milk solids when compared to proven sires. (more…)